Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I cringed (not chuckled) as I listened to the author read this book, choosing the audio version, so there could be no debate about her intended voice as she spoke the words. I imagined what living with this woman was like, and I was haunted by her words, "I don't know how to have fun", and thought to myself now she wants to make sure that no one else in her family does either!. In some states, what she did to her children has to be considered illegal and absolute emotional child abuse. Does she attempt humor in the book? Yes, but it falls flat against the backdrop of the emotional abuse of her children. She takes comfort that after she abuses them they hug her, seeking out love from the abusive parent, while the husband does nothing to stop the abuse. She boasts that the children never took a day off from piano practice, even when sick with a fever or after oral surgery (she just shoves painkillers at her daughters and commands them to practice). After playing piano for hours and hours one day, one daughter was hungry for dinner at 5:30PM. Mommy dearest responds with "no, no dinner until 9:00PM because you must practice for hours more." I suppose if the societal challenge was escape from the gulag, her extreme parenting would help toughen us up for the challenge. But this portrait of the childhood she stole from her daughters is pathetic. She is so narcissistic and delusional: she has convinced herself that she does this all for her childrens' benefits. You won't be fooled though when you hear her description of the room at the St. Regis and the food and the bussed in friends. She is so transparent. When she states "we gave up the violin", you know you've met this type of lunatic parent before. Can you imagine Michael Phelps's mother saying "we gave up swimming"? This is what did it for me: When grandmother begged for one single day, just one whole day, to spend with her granddaughters, this mother (the author) did not allow it. The grandmother is now dead--no more wasted days with Grandma--off to more piano practice. She tries, unconvincingly, to show her "softer" side toward her dogs, but when a mother is willing to endlessly berate and dominate her children year after year after year, do we really care that she was "low key" as a dog owner? She is so unlikeable as a human being that by the end of the book if you had asked me to choose between being stuck in an elevator for 3 hours with Amy Chua or Glenn Beck, I would choose to endure Glenn Beck. The frightening aspect of this book is that the mother couldn't see that she actually put her younger child at real risk--if the book had ended in the child's suicide, you would honestly have said to yourself, "well I could see that coming". Thank God the child liberates herself from her mother with no more damage than a bad haircut and bad memories. As far as Western parenting, you can set high standards and high expectations without emotionally abusing your children. I'll take our Western parented outcomes of Steve Jobs, Jon Stewart, Michael Phelps, Hilary Clinton, and Sonja Sotomayer any day over her control freak, abusive parenting. These high achievers all had lots of fun and play in their lives, and they likely all had some "whole days" with their grandmas.